


The God of Dust and Nothing

by CiderApples



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 20:23:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14028051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples
Summary: Hannibal's gone, and something is wrong with the stag. Will goes out to fix it.





	The God of Dust and Nothing

 

When Will first saw the stag again, it was after so long _not_ seeing it that he mistook it for a real live animal.

He paused on the trail, boots sinking in March mud, and called the dogs back. They circled around him, panting and watching while he clucked softly to shush them, but when he looked into the trees there was nothing at all to be seen.

 

* * *

 

When Will saw the stag next, there was no mistaking it for anything else. He woke up in his bed, sleep paralysis holding him down, a black snout so close to his face that he could almost taste its wet nose from the smell of its breath.

It was standing on his bed.

For a moment, it just stood there.

Then it pushed closer.

A cold slick touched the tip of Will’s nose, and a humid puff gusted over his face. He breathed it in. For a moment, he puzzled over it. Tasted it against his palate. Then he looked up into the cold, impassive eyes.

“You’re sick,” he said.

 

* * *

 

“There’s nothing medically wrong with you,” Neurologist 3 said. Neurologists 1 and 2 had said roughly the same thing. After his experience with Hannibal's neurologist, Will liked his opinions to come in multiples. In _sounders._

The corner of his mouth hooked up.

“Mr. Graham?”

The doctor canted his head, trying to put himself in Will’s line of sight, but Will's line of sight was not straight: it led elsewhere. Uncomfortable with the lack of response, the doctor stumbled on. “There’s plenty more we can try. We can start small on some sedatives for nighttime, maybe try to slot in an antipsychotic but I really only like to prescribe something like that as a last resort.” He tapped his pen on his laptop.

Will could see the screen in the mirror behind him: Google, open in a cascade of tabs.

 _hallucinations sleep paralysis_  
_hallucinations night_  
_hallucinations no heachache_  
_sleep clinic virginia_  
_FBI health insurance_  
_sexy brunette bored teen sucks cock_

“Have you ever been to a sleep clinic?” the doctor asked.

Will forced himself to make eye contact, squinting with the effort as his head slowly turned. “I’ll consider it,” he said.

 

* * *

 

 Will did his own Googling.

_lasting effects viral meningitis_

It was possible, so it seemed, that he’d been left with a ghost.

Had that been part of Hannibal’s design? Or was the stag an unexpected parting gift?

Hannibal would be…pleased.

Wherever he was.

 

* * *

 

Hannibal was not in Baltimore.

Baltimore was where Hannibal  _should_ have been, and it was where he had gone _from_.

Jack Crawford had called Will at home after Hannibal’s escape. He’d sounded suspicious, as Will supposed he had a right to be: but of Hannibal, not him. It was Hannibal who would come looking; not the other way around.

“I’d like to put people on you,” Jack had said.

Agents. Around Will’s house, his little ship on the water.

 _That won’t do,_ Will had thought, in Hannibal’s voice.

“No thanks, Jack.”

He’d looked around the living room, across the warm mounds of dog all crowding to be closest to the fire. Something else was there, too, sleeping on the rug just inside the front door. Its feathery, black hackles ruffled in an invisible draft.

Will had wanted to ask Jack if Hannibal had left him anything, but if Hannibal had left him something, Jack would’ve said so. Jack would’ve wanted to see what he’d do.

 

* * *

 

For a while, Will expected a visit.

He found himself cleaning more. Eating better. Just in case.

But then no visit came, and he snapped back. The house became messy, unkempt, until it begged for order.

Months passed, and they passed slowly.

Will spoke to Jack Crawford less, then much less, then finally not at all. His teaching contracts were quietly not renewed.

 

* * *

 

Even in Will’s dreams, where his mind could write a more pleasing fiction than his current reality, Hannibal remained firmly himself.

He'd cooked.

They were eating.

Hannibal stood over him, pouring wine, and the wine was black, leaking down the stem of the glass like blood through a vein.

“Are you afraid, Will?” he asked.

Will looked into his eyes, where his eyes should have been. The slits there were empty.

“Yes.”

Hannibal took this as a matter of fact. “Why? Do you think I want to kill you?”

Will tipped his chin up. “Do you?”

“Why would I?” Hannibal smiled tightly. Restrained. He lifted the wine bottle and wiped its dripping mouth with a dark cloth. “Do you think I want revenge?”

“No. You don’t need revenge. You-” his mouth tightened, “- _forgave_ me.”

Hannibal nodded. He put the bottle down on the table. Will could hear the glass breathing: soft, familiar whuffling.

Will swallowed.

“Drink,” Hannibal said.

Will lifted his glass. “This isn’t wine.”

“No, it’s not.”

Under Hannibal’s expectant gaze, Will sipped at the stag’s blood. He realized he knew the taste.

“Are you afraid that I’ll come?” Hannibal asked, watching. “Or are you afraid that I won’t?"

 

* * *

 

 Will closed the house for the winter.

He bought a beat-up camper van, piled the dogs into it, and took off.

There was something _wrong_ with the stag.

It wasn’t well.

It moved too slowly, breathed only with great effort, and had lost its strange coat in gaping patches that splashed along its hide. It looked mangy.

Will had never been able to resist mangy.

When he turned out of the driveway for the last time, the stag walked, or ran, or floated, beside the van, and Will let it lead.

 

* * *

 

The stag liked to watch the news.

It lay between the hotel beds, on the ground, while Will took one mattress and the dogs took the other.

It directed Will to read the papers.

 _Search for Missing Officer Called Off_  
_Community Leader Mourned_  
_Serial Slayer in Boynton_  
_Body Discovered in Fellowes Park_

This was its design.

 

* * *

 

Its coat started to come in again as they crossed through South Dakota, and was full by Idaho.

In Washington, the stag led the camper up toward the mountains then veered sideways, past peach orchards and sorghum fields, up almost into Canada before it stopped. The town it chose was nothing but a series of roads strung out from a rail depot. Will drove them slowly, his constant companion hoofing along outside the window, and finally the camper rolled to a halt all by itself at the end of a long driveway.

Will didn’t know how he knew, at first, but when he turned down, he realized the driveway was lined in clamshells: so out of place, here, and looking so very much like shattered teacups.

 

* * *

 

“Are you still afraid, Will?” Hannibal asked.

Will looked the room over. It wasn’t big, but it was Hannibal in every way. Ornate in small, intense bursts, and severe everywhere else. “I know I should be,” he said. “I know I _am_.”

“But?”

“I don’t _want_ to be.”

Hannibal swept a hand absently over the surface of his small desk. “That time — that urge — has passed,” he said. “I would no more derive pleasure from killing you than from killing a songbird.”

“You’ve killed several songbirds that I know of,” Will said. “You drowned some, just to eat them bones and all, before the eyes of God.”

Hannibal considered this. “Yes,” he said. “So I have. But you are not that kind of songbird, Will. Your fruit is not so forbidden.”

Will drew a wan smile. “And what fruit, exactly, do I bear for you?”

“One I cannot cultivate,” Hannibal said. “One that must grow wild.”

The stag snuffed against Will’s neck, hot and ticklish.

 

* * *

 

Will had never known nor imagined Hannibal to be tamed, but Hannibal had no drawings, here. He kept no knives. Will peered into the closets and found no suits, only t-shirts.

Anathema.

Across the kitchen table one night, Will looked at Hannibal hard — across a dinner of cans opened crudely — and debated leaving.

“Will,” Hannibal said. He dabbed a spoonful of creamed corn delicately from the can. “Can you be happy here?”

The stag paced just outside the window, edges smoldering.

Will frowned. “Can _you?”_ he accused.

Hannibal smiled, almost. “This is the life they’ll give me, when they catch me,” he said. “I choose to live that new life now, so that I need not fear its revelation.”

“I won’t be a part of that life,” Will said, testing.

Hannibal said, only: “Won’t you?”

 

* * *

 

Even here, the stag kept Will up nights.

Something was still wrong, or at least, not quite all right.

It stared. It paced. It grated its hooves against Hannibal's rough wood floors until Will rose from the dead and circled the house like a marble in a funnel, knowing where he’d end up: dropped into the dark hole of the bathroom, into the vortex of the medicine cabinet. He’d brought a straight razor with him from home. It was the only blade in the house, and every night he checked to see if it had disappeared.

So far, Hannibal hadn’t touched it, even to shave.

 

* * *

 

It was in the hour of no crickets, before the morning birds, that the stag came to kneel on Will’s chest. It ground its knees in urgently until Will gasped awake.

In the no-light of the new moon he stumbled to the bathroom, forgetting to flip the switch. He clawed the mirror forward and swept his hand over the shelf where the razor lived.

For the first time it was bare.

In the pitch, Will went still.

Slowly, cautiously, he reached behind for the light, eyes wide for the mirror for what would illuminate there, but when the light burned on, there was only himself.

The razor in his own hand, unsheathed.

And an acute, ringing disappointment.

The stag’s head pushed out impossibly through the open cabinet, and they stared, eye-to-eye, realizing.

Then Will took a walk down the hall.

“Will,” Hannibal said, when Will woke him. He did his best to sound alert. 

“Hannibal,” Will said. He held the razor at the right angle to catch starlight. He felt he could see Hannibal’s pupils dilate, even in the dark.

“Hello, Will,” Hannibal said, in a completely different way.

Will smiled. He’d almost forgotten how to. He put a plate on the bed. A needle. Thread. Bandages. He didn’t know if they’d be used, but that was the question, wasn’t it, that needed to be answered?

He put the blade to his own throat.

Hannibal’s hand threaded out from under his blanket and touched Will’s knee. “I’m here,” he said.

Will sunk the blade.

Hannibal’s lips parted to catch the spray for just a moment, before he tore out of the bed, into action.

 

* * *

 

“You’re warmer than most,” Hannibal said. “I suspected you would be.”

Hannibal pulled a slippery finger along the shallow canyon that Will had opened in his own thigh.

“Did you?” Will said, serene with opioids. “I always felt I ran cold.”

“Perhaps in some ways. Not this one.”

Hannibal watched the blood pool.

What had always been missing from surgery — and in a certain sense from killing — was this sense of time; the leisure of watching.

The last time they'd done this, Will had offered his left arm, an exploration of the tricep and the gift of a small filet the size of a sliced water chestnut, to be sauteed with fiddleheads from the yard.

There would be no sautee, today.

In a deft movement, Hannibal peeled back a thin, almost transparent sheet of dark, burgundy muscle. Not so much that it would be missed. He lifted it to his mouth on the razor’s edge and took it with his tongue without touching the blade.

In the tasting - the pressing to the roof of his mouth to crush the blood from the fiber - his eyes slipped shut, blindly savoring.

“Will,” he said, when it was gone.

Will opened his eyes. Hannibal remained poised over the cut. The needle and thread waited patiently for when he'd had his fill.

“This isn’t how you I intend to keep you with me in that next life,” he said. “The one Jack Crawford will give me, if he’s able.”

“I know,” Will said, and he _did_ know. From Hannibal's reverent stropping of the razor to his steady stitching afterward, this act was far less field dressing and far more transubstantiation. Consummation, not consumption.

But Hannibal was unsatisfied. He made as if to slice again, then paused. “This is...more.”

Will’s hand drifted down on Hannibal's head, crowning the slate hair with his palm.

“I know.”

Hannibal gazed briefly at the ground, deep beyond the cabin floor, then up, as Will turned his head toward the window, toward the big, black, ruffled, horned shape stalking gloriously past the house in full finery.

“See?” Will said. _“See?”_

  

 

 

 


End file.
